


Small, Yet Immense

by mayrwyn



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, I'm Bad At Tagging, Vessels, inner thoughts, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-30
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2018-09-13 10:53:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9120514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayrwyn/pseuds/mayrwyn
Summary: Jimmy Novak has a decision to make.





	

Jimmy Novak believed.

Not the way some others seemed to believe. The ones who had set the spiritual part of themselves aside, shoved it into a box that they brought out when it was acceptable and convenient. Jimmy believed in a way that was inconvenient. It was hard. It challenged him every day of his life.

When he was young, Jimmy's life smelled of paint and graphite and the sharp tang of color markers. He  
spent hour after hour lost in the lines and curves of creation, splashes of color amid a thousand shades between black and white. He filled notebooks with elves and trolls and cartoonish hoppy toads. Page after page of shoulder blades, the backs of knees, and strong jawlines. An entire book filled with hands, broad, strong, long-fingered and dainty. And other hands, wounds dripping bright red blood, a crown of thorns and lash marks across a muscled back.

Jimmy had public, imaginary crushes and secret, real ones. He had school dances and ball games and pranks on Halloween.

At seventeen, Jimmy had a crisis. It wasn’t doubt, exactly. No, he didn't doubt. Doubting would have been easier. Had he not believed so matter-of-factly, he could have set it all aside and done as he pleased. He could have embraced the parts of himself that didn't quite fit, the thoughts and feelings that could barely be ignored but that he could never quite manage to stop having. That not believing would make it easier was, surely, further proof of his sinful nature. Jimmy did believe, so he broke down and talked to a pastor. Not his own, he wasn't that strong. He wanted to be that strong, but really, seventeen was mostly still a child. They were only questions, not doubts, and he didn't want to worry Reverend Davis, so he found someone else to ask.

“Some people's lives are harder than others,” the pastor said. “Some people are given more challenges to face.” There was an inflection in his voice and a look in his eyes, though, that made Jimmy glad he hadn't asked Reverend Davis, after all.

God would never expect of him more than he could give.

The universe was vast and its Creator all encompassing, and He knew best.

“Read your bible. Pray. God will tell you what you should do,” the man said, with a look that suggested Jimmy already knew.

Jimmy did know.

The bible said, “When I was a child I spoke, thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.”

Jimmy packed away his paints and his brushes and his sketchbooks, and decided James would study marketing instead of art. He became serious and studious, as a young man should be, and he perfected the ability to decline alcohol without seeming judgmental about it. He kept his eyes focused where he was allowed to look, prayed for forgiveness on those rare occasions he caught himself glancing where he shouldn't, and he most certainly did not touch. Anyone.

Then there was Amelia. She was kind and gentle and, he suspected, too good for him. When he stood too close to her the air felt thin, like he couldn't get enough oxygen no matter how he tried, and the sound of her laughter seemed to dance up and down his spine. They were married at twenty-one, a week after James completed his degree, and then time seemed to blur. Years escaped into the past at such an alarming rate that he didn't even notice until they were long gone.

His place in the universe was to be the head of a household. He was a faithful husband, and then a father, and if someone mentioned that most of their income came from his wife he would smile proudly and say, “her worth is far above rubies”.

But he wondered, sometimes. He worked hard. He devoted a considerable amount of time to deciding how many extra hours he could work to try to make more money before it would be neglectful to his family. He studied his bible and talked to their pastor (he was no Rev. Davis, but he was sincere and knowledgeable. James trusted him). Amelia sometimes got frustrated by the lack of money, and he knew that it would have been much worse if he hadn't inherited his grandfather's house. Still, it needed painting and the plumbing wasn't the best, and he knew that she had hoped to stay home with Clair for at least the first few years.

She didn't get to stay home with Clair, though. Sometimes, late at night, between the time he had set aside for his devotionals and heading off to bed, James would catch himself staring into space, feeling hollow and empty. He shrugged those moments off. Dismissed them as just the normal pangs of growing older. They had wanted more children, but he told himself he should be grateful for Clair. They had wanted to one day build their own house, but he tried to only be grateful that they had such a large and warm home in his grandparents' old place. And of course, Amelia's job should be caring for their home and Clair, but she claimed to want to work and never said much about bringing in more money than he did. He pretended to believe her, but sometimes he caught a look in her eye that suggested she was being less than forthcoming. He should be grateful that he had such a good wife, that she didn't find fault in him because his job wasn't the most lucrative.

He had so much to be grateful for. He was so blessed.

Anything that felt unfinished or less than perfect was surely the Adversary whispering in his ear. He would pray harder. He would confess his covetous nature and he would work harder to be the provider he was supposed to be.

God had a plan. James knew God had a plan in a way that he couldn't even describe. The idea of not knowing that all was as God willed it, that sounded ludicrous to James. He was in his mid-thirties now, and his faith, he thought, was unshakeable.

Sometimes, he thought about the mission field. He thought about entering seminary. But he knew that there was a calling, and he had been told many times that when one was called to such a thing there was no mistaking it. He hadn't felt anything that he could describe as a calling.

Well, not until Castiel.

Castiel wasn't confirmation of anything, really. The word confirmation sounded like evidence, and he had never needed more evidence of the existence of God, or angels, or of the fact that everyone had a role to play in God's plan. He had suspected, perhaps, that his role would be limited to the familial, but if he were completely honest Castiel actually felt...inevitable. There was awe, but there was never shock. Not for James. Castiel said he was chosen, and a very small part of him whispered, “Of course.”

James had given up Jimmy. He had given up listening to secular music. He had long since gained control of lust, except for that which was allowed, the warm and comforting embrace of his wife. He had never tended toward vanity, and he kept his body well-nourished and properly fit. He ate for nourishment, and not for pleasure. He had given up art. (Surely doodles on meeting notes and scribbles on napkins were okay. Those were doodles. They weren't art.).

He had hollowed himself out, made a sacrifice of all the unacceptable pieces of himself, and now he was chosen. He was special.

But there was Amelia, a bottle of pills in her hand. He hoped Clair was asleep, that she couldn't hear them.

“I'm not sick,” he said.

“Jimmy, take the pills,” she repeated.

“I know that this is hard to understand, but he chose me.”

“Castiel the angel?” She sounded like the very thought of it wounded her. She was absolutely convinced that James was mentally ill.

There were more words. Explanations that sounded like pleas to his own ears. But everything had already been said.

Or not said.

It was in the tone of her voice, the less than subtle look in her eyes, when she said the sentence that was more telling than all the others. He asked her why it so hard to believe an angel would be talking to him.

“Jimmy, you sell ad time for a.m. radio,” she said.

Her words echoed as a stream of memories played out behind his eyes.

_The look on her face when it was obvious she couldn't stay home with Clair, that she would have to keep working._

_The way she shoved at him to stay on his side of the bed. He ran hot, she said, and she needed space from him to breathe. He had laughed about it, even teased her, but now what had seemed perfectly natural felt more like pulling away._

_The whispered conversations with her mother that stopped when he came into a room._

_The assumption that he would go to parents' night at the school. She had to work and he could slip away. The look on her face could have been as much accusation as disappointment, couldn't it?_

Little things, from further back than he wanted to contemplate.

_Sitting at the table with Clair, telling her that she could mix yellow and blue to make green, and Amelia blowing out a breath behind him._

_“She's four, James. You'll confuse her,” she said, rolling her eyes as she bent over their daughter's coloring book, taking the yellow crayon out of Claire's hand, “Just try to stay inside the lines, sweetie.”_

_“Dad says the lines are a ses-chun.”_

_“Suggestion,” James repeated, fighting a grin._

_Amelia wasn't smiling. “Well, your daddy's just being silly. Use the blue for Belle's dress. There.”_

_“She wanted to make it green,” he said, irritated but unable to put into words a reason why._

_“Belle's dress is blue,” Amelia said._

 

When James said Castiel spoke to him, Amelia said, “Jimmy, you sell ad time for a.m. radio.”

Amelia had watched him submerge his arm in boiling water and bring it back out unscathed, and yet she still didn't believe. Their faith was a thing that they had always shared, the basis of their marriage and their family life together, but now she was incapable of treating something like Castiel as real.

When he said to have faith, she said, “I'm taking Clair and going to my mother's.”

Amelia could say she believed in God, and in Angels, but she couldn't say she believed in James.

If it were not for the fact of Castiel and what his existence meant, James may have never noticed the wound that was festering just underneath the surface of their marriage. All those things that now seemed tainted may have remained unnoticed, may in fact have been proven false had they spoken about them.

It could have only been a moment of insecurity.

Instead, it became the moment Jimmy decided.

**Author's Note:**

> This is marked as part of a Supernatural/The Walking Dead fusion series, but it is perfectly capable of standing alone. It isn't necessary to read any other part of the (upcoming) series. This is the Jimmy that existed in that universe, and may differ in part or in whole from the Jimmy you are familiar with.


End file.
